Tag Archives: The True Power Of Essential Oils

Yes, I do think so. I had been saving this beauty for some unspecified future special occasion, but I think this is now going in with me.

It is in the auxiliary products of this perfume that the differences between the vintage and the gutted, debrained reformulation are even more glaringly obvious and damning: the new soap is a flashy yellow citric vetiver thing with an unpleasant undernote I can’t abide and would never buy again (the same with a body cream I got as well that was quite vile).

The original soap, though, is glorious and really beautifully scented: deep, leathery suds combine with vetiver and iris and a touch of the floral green notes up top, forming the perfect layer for the perfume.

In truth, this will be a bloodied, wounded man on crutches trying desperately to salvage some smell dignity in the confines of the disabled hospital toilet but so be it: the savon is so strongly scented that it will tint its surroundings with Chanel, and that is no bad thing.

My personally remixed vintage Chanel Nº19 eau de toilette

In thinking about what perfumes I should be taking into hospital and should have as ‘my smell’ (aside the foul one I will have from lying in my bed all the time and not showering or bathing), it didn’t take me long to settle on this, one of my top three holy grails. Not because I always feel like wearing it, not by any stretch – I go for sweeter, more tropical scents on the whole – but because the vintage is just so good, and so multi-faceted, that I feel it will give off exactly the sillage I want (it is already drenched all over my dressing gown – that’s bath robe to you North Americans) and all the other clothes I am taking.

I believe that this perfume will confer on me some kind of immunity to embarrassment. And the supercilious, Parisian greenness of it will absorb some of the mortification of what I know in advance is going to happen from being The Foreigner in the hospital.

As for the remix, well it was necessary. I acquired the bottle you see here ( LOVE that thick, oblong bottle): a vintage that had quite nice, rich, base notes, and still enough iris to still merit buying it, but it wasn’t quite good enough to wear. I therefore added some bergamot and galbanum essential oils ( I know!) and then varying amounts of other extraits that I have in my collection to turn it into something like my own private parfum de toilette.

It is pretty much perfect now; very green ; irisian, with all the penetrating and lingering vetiver base notes there as well.

This is my hospital scent.

Chanel Nº19 vintage parfum

Because when certain visitors come, I will still need the thicker paint to dab on the wrists.

My personally remixed Guerlain Vetiver Cologne

I know: the arrogance. But I basically know what I am doing. I have yet to do a full review of vintage Guerlain Vetiver, which I truly think was an extremely beautiful, mellow, smoky perfume that was a vital part of the Guerlain canon; emotional, intelligent, crepuscular. One day I will.

This old bottle of cologne from a flea market was given to me half full, slightly turned, but in dry-down, redolent enough of the original I remember so fondly to merit me adding a third of the current eau de toilette (not so bad, really: just as though the original had had some of its most important memories extracted but were still, basically, the same person).

To body it up, I added specially chosen vetiver essential oil for depth; black pepper (in the original notes) to rev it up and add vitality, plus some bergamot and lemon.

I have possibly made it slightly too citric (but then you see it was a cologne), but I basically do love this new reconstructed version of mine. I also think that it won’t clash too much with the Chanel, but will rather add to the Noel Coward charm I hope to cultivate while hospitalized.

My snake skin case of specially selected essential oils

ESSENTIAL.

More important than perfume in fact.

With all those germs flying about and the danger of hospital infections so prevalent these days you can bet your bottom dollar that I will be surrounded by an aura of bactericidal essences that smell nice (lemon, bergamot, lavender), soothe the spirits and senses, kill infections before they get anywhere near my person, or are cicatrising agents.

I don’t intend of course to sabotage the doctors’ work, don’t worry, but I know for a fact that thick, viscous, Biblical essences such as myrrh and benzoin, and particularly frankincense, are great wound healers and will be self-administered.

I will use them if I get a chance to have a bath, or else put them in other places on my body in areas not directly connected to the operated area.

Like Lazarus, I will walk again.

The vetiver……

In fact, what I was planning (and this might strike you as quite abnormal, somewhat), was to enter the operation theatre bathed in vetiver essential oil; not so much as to interfere or interact with anything, nor to be overtly there on the skin, interrupting the good surgeons’ work, but to have imbibed and macerated myself in it beforehand, for days, like a Hindu yogi.

About twenty years ago I was in Melaka, Malaysia, one of my very first experiences of Asia – and it is a memory that has stayed with me forever.

I was alone, staying with some friends in a business district of Kuala Lumpur, but had then come to this alluring, ancient town for a couple of nights, entranced just wandering around and breathing it all in.

The highlight though was undoubtedly one street, which seemed to be some kind of microcosm of how the world might be today and always if people weren’t so stupid and so full of hatred of difference, and almost unbearably idealistic in retrospect.

There was a Dutch colonial Christian church on the corner in one part of town, and then, when you went down the road a bit, there was a Hindu temple next door to a mosque next door to a Chinese temple, all the sounds and smells comingling to the extent that you could never fully escape your neighbour……….but to me it was a beautiful cacophony.

I actually spent that afternoon recording the sounds on my tape recorder, interviewing people in some kind of naive ecstacy of exotic excitement, felled by the smells and aromas and atmospheres and musics, but one of the most vivid recollections I still have was when I finally went into the Hindu temple and was assailed with the deepest, coolest, almost minted, earthen vetiver that filled every cavity of that space and my head as the holy man, naked save for a loin cloth, sat there in a meditative pose, silent, covered head to toe in vetiver khus: pasted on his body, I just stood there and savoured it, inhaling the roots, lost in the moment and becoming vetiver. It was exquisite.

Thus, sadly bringing you back round to my current Japanese reality……I wanted to replicate that exact sensation by bathing all this week in vetiver essential oil, to the extent that it would just breathe from my pores while I am being operated on (the plant is naturally anti-februge; prevents fever; is bactericidal as well as mellowing down the heart rate, and calming the nerves)….

It would have been perfect, but me being me I overdid it a bit last week with the citrus oils in the bath ( I should have known better; I know which oils suit me and which don’t; I can bathe in bergamot and never have problems – I find it so re-equilibrating as an essence, and emerge lucid and clear, but should have remembered that I can’t tolerate even very small amounts of orange or grapefruit near my skin as I immediatley hive up and come out in red patches. Lemon I thought was different but uh-oh: I hadn’t dispersed the water properly and, shit! I have come up in a big sensitized burn on my right thigh where the oil had collected in concentration, and this week, on top of a hundred other panics, I am now worrying that this might prevent the surgeons from operating (although it is now, thankfully, beginning to fade) .

They were very clear, however, on the fact that I couldn’t catch a cold, as you will recollect from the post from the other day (in the end, just for your information, I decided to stay at home, as the threat of potential viruses outside just assailed my consciousness way too much and I thought it better to relax here: which I have, when I haven’t been sucked into hysteria, usually in the dark hours of the middle of the night): but anyway: this sensitized patch – why couldn’t it have been on a different part of the body?!!!, such bad luck) – seems to be going down now and I don’t want to risk any more sensitization.

I did have a bath yesterday, actually, using the Tasmanian lavender you see in the box (fantastically relaxing!) and I think it has had a positive effect on the patch, but vetiver I don’t know.

But in tribute to that otherworldly Malaysian Indian man, I will have some oil placed strategically in certain private places, just to emit, silently – while under,; but it will not, sadly but sensibly, be the full Melakan fantasy. I wouldn’t want the surgeons in a state of oneiric hypnosis, in any case. They have their work cut out already.

In the snake case you will also notice some lotion, and some vaseline. The latter is lemon-infused lip balm – divine! – just standard vaseline with lemon essential added to it, but it is so uplifting and cheering and germ killing that it is perfect for when I get a visitor or a nurse comes and I want to evince a sudden burst of lemon peel (the effect is almost holographic). I will also need seriously lubed up lips for the anaesthetic as I know that when you come round (I will be under for five and a half hours, yikes), your lips are as dry as dead leaves: I would prefer to begin the proceedings glistening and citrussy than stoically dried out and desiccated.

For skin – because just I don’t do leather face, and take these things seriously, we see in the photograph my home-adultered Shiseido Lait De Beauté, familiar to all friends who have ever come to stay with me who usually end up stealing my moisturizers and taking them home with them.

This is a very effective, but inexpensive lotion (500 yen, or about five dollars) – unscented, to which I add whichever oils suit my skin (and mood) best at any given time. Over time, they have included palmarosa, patchouli, ylang ylang, geranium, neroli (amazing), galbanum (- a recent addition), myrrh, but perhaps most effectively, frankincense, which just soothes the face so beautifully at night and helps you to sleep as well. The only other skin products I use are pure coconut oil – just lather me up like a Thai banana fritter and eat me: you might think it too greasy and pore-clogging, that you would just wake up the next day like a greased up, zit-tastic teenager, but nothing could be further from the truth.

I have a strange intuition about when and when not to moisturize: my skin just tells me not tonight, please, or else it just says slather mein coconut. A more immediate wrinkle eradicator I can’t imagine, the stuff is nature’s dream, and it is well known on The Black Narcissus that coconut is probably my favourite note in all of perfumery anyway so I am quite content to just lie there like a sweet Thai dessert and see rich, oleaginous dreams.

Yes….so this case of goodness will be beside me at all times: I shall be self-dispensing; a drop of sweet marjoram on the tongue when it all gets too much, here, some hyssop oil, as well – one I have never tried before but which is good for bone healing and which smells very strange and intriguing and so I bought it at the shop in Tokyo, Tree Of Life in Harajuku, my favourite haunt for such things: (I also think that essential oils are so instinctive and intuitive; some really suit you, and others don’t, and you know immediately: if you were to replace my selections here, for instance, with my migraine- inducing nemeses : basil, aniseed, petitgrain, sandalwood, pine, helichrysum (immortelle- hell in a bottle!); fir, cinnamon leaf, tea tree (brilliant stuff therapeutically, but I just hate the smell of it so much); carrot seed, cumin, citronella (mosquito horror personified!) and lemongrass (so rasping!) the oils would actually have a detrimental effect on me, despite their proven qualities; be head-splitting and rough, but hyssop…. my body just said yes.

Same as it does with eucalyptus. Oh that stuff is good in the bath….

Some new perfumes

Because I will need something to do and I want to review for you.

This new range, to be launched later this year, is very good…

And then some old familiars:

Roger & Gallet Gingembre Cologne

This, I would say, is the perfect remedy for slovenly piss-in-pyjamas modification: the kind of scent you can just spray on when someone is coming to the door and you want to smell fresh as a daisy.

I love ginger anyway (but not really the essential oil, I forgot to add that one), but this gentle creation is not especially gingery; that note is just there somewhere among the classic cologne notes, that are nevertheless not too classic colonia/cologne a la 4711 or Acqua Di Parma (and which I don’t really like).

No, this is a modern interpretation; clear; uplifting, a touch staid and unexciting, perhaps, but clean, loveable, long-lasting, and good.

Vol De Nuit Cologne

There is no point in taking any orientals with me into hospital. In fact, I am very particular about what perfumes work in what circumstances

(…another aside, just for a moment…………one very surprising thing I learned the other day while undergoing a ‘battery’ of hospital tests, was my blood type…

In Japan, blood types are used in the way we used zodiac signs in the West. There is a deep belief in the differences in people’s characters according to what blood type they are here, even direct prejudice (some people won’t marry someone of the ‘wrong’ type, and it is one of the first questions people apparently ask when dating; many people I have met here in Japan have been very surprised that I didn’t know mine…. but do most westerners?

Type B is apparently considered extremely eccentric and selfish, does its own thing only; O is strong, boorish, headstrong, based in reality; A is boring and careful, conservative, finnickety- the majority of Japanese are proudly A – while AB is considered freakish and odd.

Skyping with my parents last night, I asked them what type they were because I couldnt’ remember if they had ever told me (my mother had lost the records that contained my own type and I have often wondered).

Apparently my dad is a very rare B negative, my mother A. My brother is AB, we don’t know about my sister, and I, it turns out, am A. My Japanese friends were extremely surprised, even horrified. You, A??!!! But you are so not Japanese?!

I agree: I assumed that with my big-bodied aggressivess I might be O, or with my obvious weirdness, B or AB (Duncan is B), but never A…..but then a friend pointed out to me quite rightly that my attitude towards writing (careful, pedantic, if violently spontaneous) and perfume (obsessive, comprehensive) is actually very A)..

Of course, all of this is probably utter bullshit, but then so is the Zodiac, except for the fact that it isn’t – simply because through empirical experience I know that a lot of what is said about the signs is literally true, from my friends, family and other loved ones to my colleagues and students. Who knows: perhaps something about blood types might be true for all we know as well…..

My attitude towards which perfumes work in what circumstances, though, in many ways, is ‘very A’..

I am never going to just spray an oriental perfume onto dirty unwashed skin, for example. Some people don’t think about these perfumed points enough. But if you want to get it right, you have to. Some perfumes go great on skin and clothes no matter what their state (that Gingembre I am taking in with me is a good example). Others, emphatically do not. You have to be clean.

Do you think I will be lying there sweating and seeping on my ‘cot’ and ladling on Bal A Versailles to my seeping sores? God no. I hate that beloved perfume unless I have scrupulously bathed first and added talc in the right weather – for me usually the depths of winter – and then, and only then, is it heaven on earth. On unwashed skin? Skanksville. Grubby. Invasive. I would just be desperate to wash it off, as I would Shalimar or any amber or any vanilla or anything cloying or sweet that just will not go at all with my surroundings. No, they would be vile in hospital.

Vol De Nuit cologne, though.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever, and I fear I will be smelling a tad unsugared in all my lemon and vetivered finery – get bored with it, eventually, so I can imagine a time, a quiet evening on the ward, the old men asleep,when I just wash my hands and arms thoroughly, add some Vol De Nuit cologne, and let my spirits ride a bit…..

This is very different from my treasured parfum, which is by far my favourite incarnation of Night Flight, but I do like it much better than the vintage edt, which is darker, a bit too moody and standoffishly daffodilian.

The cologne, on the other hand, has a tingly, bright-burst beginning like the white of afternoon sunlight, the oriental facets kept effectively at bay until the end of its duration on the skin, when the powdered cremeuese of the classic Vol De Nuit base comes to the forelight. I need this. Just for private moments.

As I do my

Puapuakeni and Poison

These two will not really go with my featured hospital smell identity (but who knows; when D brings in my washed garments after a week or two I might switch and go all BoraBora – at this time of year I always start craving tropical florals anyway); but even if I don’t, and I just sink into foetid vetiver realness, having these lovelies just there on the side will remind me that one day I am coming out and that my perfume collection will be waiting for me.

This is important.

I don’t know about you, but when I am away for any length of time from home, I really crave my perfumes; I want them, I need them, I have to smell them or just have them next to me by my bed.

And a scent craving is a strange and unusual craving indeed. It’s different from a food one (caffeine, meat, sugar, fat, citrus), gut-driven and physical, base; an alcohol one (psychological); a visual one (sometimes I need to see certain films in my collection, but it’s different), or just an intense craving for cosmopolitan stimulation (I know I will really miss the city when I am cooped up in the hospital), but something more.

With perfume it’s all of these things. It’s psychological yes, but it’s also very much stimulation, and I would also say, physical, to be honest – from the gut, the heart and brain – a very three dimensional experience, something you feel and internalise intensely, even spiritually, not just some random evaporating liquid on the surface of the skin.